Is empathy important to leadership? If so, what are the benefits of having an empathic leader?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Although many researchers focus on either emotional intelligence or cognitive
intelligence, Humphrey and his colleagues argued that both are important to leadership
(Humphrey, 2002; Kellett, Humphrey, & Sleeth, 2002, 2006). Their model emphasizes empathy,
emotional expression, intelligence, and complex task performance. In their studies, the authors
developed a measure of Interactive Empathy that measures whether leaders take initiative in
creating a two-way emotional bond in which they influence others’ emotions as well as feel
others’ emotions.
Interactive Empathy was the best predictor of leadership emergence in the study (Kellett,
Humphrey, & Sleeth, 2006). Interestingly, it predicted both relations leadership (leadership that
supports subordinates’ needs) and task leadership (leadership that focuses on task completion).
This shows that empathy is not just another form of relations leadership, and that it has important
benefits for task leaders as well. Wolff, Pescosolido, and Druskat ( 2002) also argued on
theoretical grounds that empathy could help with task activities.
The study also shows that the ability to express one’s own emotions can work through
empathy—for example, one could express sympathetic or supportive emotions.
The other key emotional intelligence ability in the study (Kellett et al., 2006), the ability to
identify others’ emotions, worked mostly through Interactive Empathy. Another study that
examined perspective taking (which involves the ability to understand others’ attitudes) in call
centers had very similar results, in that the effects of perspective taking were partially mediated
by empathy (i.e., worked through empathy) (Axtell, Parker, Holman, & Totterdell, 2007). Both
of these studies show the central importance of empathy to other emotional intelligence abilities
and to organizational outcomes.
Another study found that empathic leaders help their followers experience less stress and
physical symptoms, and followers with empathic leaders showed a stronger relationship between
positive affect and daily goal progress than did followers with less empathic leaders (Scott,
Colquitt, Paddock, & Judge, 2010). A further study found that empathic leaders (as rated by their
subordinates) were also rated higher in performance by their own supervisors in a study of
leaders in 38 countries (Sadri, Weber, & Gentry, 2011). Together, these studies demonstrate that
empathy is important to leader emergence as well as to leader and follower performance.